There are seven principles which Unitarian Universalist congregations affirm and promote:
The inherent worth and dignity of every person;
That sounds nice but it kind of leaves open that gigantic philosophical question of personhood. I don't really want to talk about fetuses. Is a bonobo a person? What about artificial intelligence or aliens? Thoughts about who is or isn't a person and why?
If I had to explain it in one sentence? You have to be able to stand up and say, "I'm a person." As re the bonobo question, sure signing counts.
although that would exclude some mentally or physically disabled people...
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Only corporations are people.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Anyone who WANTS to be a person IS one.
That does not exclude others, of course. The traditional view is somewhere between "someone born of a human" and "someone that others consider human". Yeah, it gets muddy.
Define "person."
While you're at it, define "worth" and "dignity."
As Bacon said, if you want to have a serious conversation, you need to ensure everyone is speaking the same language.
|
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
So yes to humans, no to Bonobos, no to AI, no to corporations, Yes to sentient aliens on another world.
Evidently no to females, too, CJ.
RPG Superstar 2015 Top 16, RPG Superstar 2013 Top 16
|
Humans, AI, sentient aliens, yes. Bonobos and dolphins no. Self-awareness and communicativeness aren't a high enough standard. Hell, my cats are self-aware and communicative. Probably the use of language to express abstract ideas would be the cutoff. I would extend the definition to include individual members of species that as a whole would be considered to be comprised of persons, even of those individuals don't exhibit the characteristics of a person. So mentally/physically handicapped, infants, vegetative state types, still all people.
Corporations aren't people, but they are groups of people. I think a lot of people who are anti-corporate forget that. You can't harm a corporation without harming its stakeholders, by which I mean shareholders, employees, suppliers, and customers.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Speaking Bonobo
The article mentions abstract ideas such as 'now' and 'bad'.
Dolphin Communications
If nothing else, worth a look just to read 'sphincter'.
I remember when tool use was the defining behavior. Sort of like planets, we pick and choose the definition until we include what we want and exclude what we don't want.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I would imagine the single defining characteristic of personhood would be sentience. But then you have to define sentience. It's a bugger.
But this whole conversation comes back to what I've said in political and religious discussions before. No one has ever disagreed that all people should be treated with dignity and respect, people have always disagreed on who counts as a person.
There are seven principles which Unitarian Universalist congregations affirm and promote:
The inherent worth and dignity of every person;
That sounds nice but it kind of leaves open that gigantic philosophical question of personhood. I don't really want to talk about fetuses. Is a bonobo a person? What about artificial intelligence or aliens? Thoughts about who is or isn't a person and why?
I think there's an assumption here that personhood is a binary quality. One either has it or one does not. That's not what we'd expect if we're referring to any actual attribute of organisms. Nature is all about continua.
So I'll horrify everyone and give a definition of personhood: demonstrating cognitive capabilities within the broad norms for an adult human, or better. That's what we actually build our society around, after all. We don't let toddlers vote and if you're mentally incompetent we can bust your legal rights down pretty close to what a toddler has. Pretty much nobody objects to that in principle.
Is a bonobo a person? I'm not very up on assessments of bonobo intelligence but it wouldn't surprise me if a bonobo were something like 40% of a person. We know for a fact the capabilities we're talking about evolved in a lineage that we share with the bonobo for a good portion of its history, after all. Of course we share even more of it with a chimpanzee. I think adult chimpanzees are probably about as much a person as a human toddler is. Call them maybe 50% people.
Artificial intelligence? Are we talking about something that's essentially a human living in a computer like we see in fiction or a true AI? I suspect we'll have AIs at least as competent as mice sometime in the next century, but I wouldn't class those as people. Nor would I class expert systems that are only as good as an adult human (or even a bit better) in one narrow area but completely incapable in others as a person.
Aliens? Same thing as any other organism. It might be harder for us to tell for organisms that evolved in very different circumstances, of course.
Humans, AI, sentient aliens, yes. Bonobos and dolphins no. Self-awareness and communicativeness aren't a high enough standard. Hell, my cats are self-aware and communicative. Probably the use of language to express abstract ideas would be the cutoff.
Then, as CF points out, chimps and bonobos easily pass. As for some others -- maybe dolphins consider us non-sentient because we're too dumb to understand their language?
I think adult chimpanzees are probably about as much a person as a human toddler is. Call them maybe 50% people.
I've read that adult parrots, on average, have the cognitive development and functionality of a 3-year-old human. Does that make them 17% people? But this sort of scale bugs me, because humans show a VERY wide range. Is someone with an 80 IQ considered an 80% person? Is Stephen Hawking a 160% person, even though he can't move or speak unassisted? And how do we account for cultural (and/or species) bias in our tests?
To my mind, if you "affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person," you're more or less making it a binary thing: every organism that meets the criteria is a "person" and therefore gets affirmed and promoted.
I think adult chimpanzees are probably about as much a person as a human toddler is. Call them maybe 50% people.I've read that adult parrots, on average, have the cognitive development and functionality of a 3-year-old human. Does that make them 17% people? But this sort of scale bugs me, because humans show a VERY wide range. Is someone with an 80 IQ considered an 80% person? Is Stephen Hawking a 160% person, even though he can't move or speak unassisted? And how do we account for cultural (and/or species) bias in our tests?
To my mind, if you "affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person," you're more or less making it a binary thing: every organism that meets the criteria is a "person" and therefore gets affirmed and promoted.
You can bet that, were there other extant human species (of our genus or of closely related genera) still walking the planet, most of us would consider them subhuman.
I've read that adult parrots, on average, have the cognitive development and functionality of a 3-year-old human. Does that make them 17% people? But this sort of scale bugs me, because humans show a VERY wide range. Is someone with an 80 IQ considered an 80% person? Is Stephen Hawking a 160% person, even though he can't move or speak unassisted? And how do we account for cultural (and/or species) bias in our tests?
It's true that we don't have a good assessment for general intelligence. We don't have a great definition of it either. But we can say the same thing about hot and cold. We don't need to know the exact temperature of something to be able to tell when it's quite a bit different in temperature from something else.
Nor do I mean to suggest this is some sort of electron-like scale where we can get to an extremely fine grain.
To my mind, if you "affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person," you're more or less making it a binary thing: every organism that meets the criteria is a "person" and therefore gets affirmed and promoted.
Yeah, that's a pretty bad idea. Maybe Jefferson could get away with it because he was vastly more ignorant of biology than we are, leaving aside the whole owning people thing, but we've got no such excuse. I would say instead that personhood being graded on a scale entails that inherent worth and dignity exist on the same scale. We are not all born equal and some of us are more standard deviations from the norm than others in both directions.
Which is also what we actually do. Toddlers don't vote. Adults do, if they care to.
|
RPG Superstar 2015 Top 16, RPG Superstar 2013 Top 16
|
Humans, AI, sentient aliens, yes. Bonobos and dolphins no. Self-awareness and communicativeness aren't a high enough standard. Hell, my cats are self-aware and communicative. Probably the use of language to express abstract ideas would be the cutoff.Then, as CF points out, chimps and bonobos easily pass. As for some others -- maybe dolphins consider us non-sentient because we're too dumb to understand their language?
I was just kind of spitballing a criterion. Not sure what criterion I'd use, but I definitely don't think bonobos and dolphins qualify as people.
|
|
I think adult chimpanzees are probably about as much a person as a human toddler is. Call them maybe 50% people.I've read that adult parrots, on average, have the cognitive development and functionality of a 3-year-old human. Does that make them 17% people? But this sort of scale bugs me, because humans show a VERY wide range. Is someone with an 80 IQ considered an 80% person? Is Stephen Hawking a 160% person, even though he can't move or speak unassisted? And how do we account for cultural (and/or species) bias in our tests?
To my mind, if you "affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person," you're more or less making it a binary thing: every organism that meets the criteria is a "person" and therefore gets affirmed and promoted.
You can bet that, were there other extant human species (of our genus or of closely related genera) still walking the planet, most of us would consider them subhuman.
I wonder if Neanderthals had survived and later evolved greater creative capacities, which of us would dominate the other...
|
|
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
So yes to humans, no to Bonobos, no to AI, no to corporations, Yes to sentient aliens on another world.
I think there's an assumption here that personhood is a binary quality. One either has it or one does not. That's not what we'd expect if we're referring to any actual attribute of organisms. Nature is all about continua.So I'll horrify everyone and give a definition of personhood: demonstrating cognitive capabilities within the broad norms for an adult human, or better. That's what we actually build our society around, after all. We don't let toddlers vote and if you're mentally incompetent we can bust your legal rights down pretty close to what a toddler has. Pretty much nobody objects to that in principle.
Is a bonobo a person? I'm not very up on assessments of bonobo intelligence but it wouldn't surprise me if a bonobo were something like 40% of a person. We know for a fact the capabilities we're talking about evolved in a lineage that we share with the bonobo for a good portion of its history, after all. Of course we share even more of it with a chimpanzee. I think adult chimpanzees are probably about as much a person as a human toddler is. Call them maybe 50% people.
Artificial intelligence? Are we talking about something that's essentially a human living in a computer like we see in fiction or a true AI? I suspect we'll have AIs at least as competent as mice sometime in the next century, but I wouldn't class those as people. Nor would I class expert systems that are only as good as an adult human (or even a bit better) in one narrow area but completely incapable in others as a person.
Aliens? Same thing as any other organism. It might be harder for us to tell for organisms that evolved in very different circumstances, of course.
But wouldn't a Chinese-Room-passing, Turing-test-passing AI be able to claim humans (or possibly other AIs) as their Creator?
With genetic manipulation (FOXP2), it is not without the realm of possibility that a future Bonobo (or chimp) could make the transition from limited signing to vocalization. Once the creature can speak to you as well as your three year old (and let's give lower primates their own Searle test), and say from behind a closed door you can't tell the difference, is the Bonobo not a person?
@ Samnell, perhaps the definition needs to expand to include all creatures possessing the likely potential to demonstrate cognitive capabilities toward the broad norms for an adult human, which allows for mentally diminished seniors, mentally disabled humans, and other animals that may not immediately demonstrate cognition beyond that of a comparable three-to-five year old child.
But wouldn't a Chinese-Room-passing, Turing-test-passing AI be able to claim humans (or possibly other AIs) as their Creator?
I'm not sure of the relevance, but sure.
With genetic manipulation (FOXP2), it is not without the realm of possibility that a future Bonobo (or chimp) could make the transition from limited signing to vocalization. Once the creature can speak to you as well as your three year old (and let's give lower primates their own Searle test), and say from behind a closed door you can't tell the difference, is the Bonobo not a person?
It would be. This is a performance standard I'm advocating, not some kind of immutable order.
@ Samnell, perhaps the definition needs to expand to include all creatures possessing the likely potential to demonstrate cognitive capabilities toward the broad norms for an adult human, which allows for mentally diminished seniors, mentally disabled humans, and other animals that may not immediately demonstrate cognition beyond that of a comparable three-to-five year old child.
The potential to perform is not the same as performing and it would be a serious error to treat it as such. We'd be letting wishful thinking rule our judgments. Mentally diminished seniors (I've known a few.) are less people than mentally competent adults. So are mentally disabled humans. (I'm related to several.) I advocate that we proportion our treatment of them to their degree of personhood. The mentally disabled get legal guardians even if they're not children and no one much minds.
|
|
But wouldn't a Chinese-Room-passing, Turing-test-passing AI be able to claim humans (or possibly other AIs) as their Creator?
I'm not sure of the relevance, but sure.
This was directed to CJ, who implied that an AI could not pass Jefferson's test because it wouldn't have received its rights from a [divine] Creator.
The potential to perform is not the same as performing and it would be a serious error to treat it as such. We'd be letting wishful thinking rule our judgments. Mentally diminished seniors (I've known a few.) are less people than mentally competent adults. So are mentally disabled humans. (I'm related to several.) I advocate that we proportion our treatment of them to their degree of personhood. The mentally disabled get legal guardians even if they're not children and no one much minds.
Ah, do you mean a legal definition of Person as opposed to a philosophical definition (mine was meant to be more philosophical)?
I wonder if Neanderthals had survived and later evolved greater creative capacities, which of us would dominate the other...I think adult chimpanzees are probably about as much a person as a human toddler is. Call them maybe 50% people.I've read that adult parrots, on average, have the cognitive development and functionality of a 3-year-old human. Does that make them 17% people? But this sort of scale bugs me, because humans show a VERY wide range. Is someone with an 80 IQ considered an 80% person? Is Stephen Hawking a 160% person, even though he can't move or speak unassisted? And how do we account for cultural (and/or species) bias in our tests?
To my mind, if you "affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person," you're more or less making it a binary thing: every organism that meets the criteria is a "person" and therefore gets affirmed and promoted.
You can bet that, were there other extant human species (of our genus or of closely related genera) still walking the planet, most of us would consider them subhuman.
I never really get used to the strangeness of the idea that one extant human (sensu lato) species is the exception, not the norm for the last 7 million years or however long ago it was that the human lineage diverged from the chimp lineage. I had this weird flash before: "Specializing in Neandertal, early Homo, and Australopithecine medicine."
But wouldn't a Chinese-Room-passing, Turing-test-passing AI be able to claim humans (or possibly other AIs) as their Creator?I'm not sure of the relevance, but sure.
This was directed to CJ, who implied that an AI could not pass Jefferson's test because it wouldn't have received its rights from a [divine] Creator
Sorry for missing the context. :)
The potential to perform is not the same as performing and it would be a serious error to treat it as such. We'd be letting wishful thinking rule our judgments. Mentally diminished seniors (I've known a few.) are less people than mentally competent adults. So are mentally disabled humans. (I'm related to several.) I advocate that we proportion our treatment of them to their degree of personhood. The mentally disabled get legal guardians even if they're not children and no one much minds.Ah, do you mean a legal definition of Person as opposed to a philosophical definition (mine was meant to be more philosophical)?
A bit of both. Our legal system's handling of personhood is obviously entwined with how we view it morally and philosophically, even if the three aren't quite the same. I've never met a person who seriously objected to things like limiting the freedom of the mentally disabled or mentally immature and placing others in something like a stewardship position over them. They obviously can't hack it like the rest of us can and that's that. So we don't treat them as fully people as we would treat a cognitively average adult.
And I'm fine with that. In fact, I think it's a good, unobjectionable idea. I've known and even loved a bit some mentally disabled people, but we have to be honest about their capabilities and what their lacks entail. We have no problem with applying the same reasoning to non-human animals that are apparently pretty far from even adequate by human standards. It's deeply suspicious to insist that species membership alone should exempt one from those standards, especially in view of the brute fact that we don't organize our societies as if it did.
Anything thats sentient (can say "I am" to themselves) is a person.
The idea must be soggy. Plenty of whales and dolphins have the requisite brain power.
|
|
Apply some Kantian ethics to the subject, though, and would you find yourself tossing the cognitively impaired human on the tracks? Naturally, if the answer (from anyone, not Samnell specifically) is no, what would be the discriminator if the sacrificial lamb were a cognitively-comparable (comparable, that is, to a three year old, or impaired human) creature like, say, a lamb?
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Apply Kant to anything and it gets moronic.
To splinter off in another direction, do we have to define personhood for Unitarian Universalism? Perhaps treat all life with respect. Of course now we have to define 'respect'. Does that mean we don't eat meat?
Ah, screw it. Let's get back to discriminating who is 'people'.
Again, we would have to define 'respect'. As I understand it, many native American cultures 'respected' animals and yet they ate them.
Perhaps treat all life with respect. Does that mean we don't eat meat?
News bulletin: in a series of experiments costing billions of dollars, scientists discover that plants are living things, too. This discovery prompts many vegetarians to become mineralitarians, who eat only inert materials such as rocks and sand. Unfortunately, some scientists maintain that the bacteria present in those media are ALSO alive.
The point to me is not in eating NO meat, but not eating creatures we consider sentient, as well as attempting to produce a sustainable model. We can either eat much less meat (as Americans specifically) or get rid of a sizable amount of the meat-eating population. I'll let you guess which one I'd prefer ;)
Again, we would have to define 'respect'. As I understand it, many native American cultures 'respected' animals and yet they ate them.
Would respect mean that we are obligated to prevent infanticide, coercive copulation, and warfare among what used to be called higher primates? The first two are natural aspects of certain primates' (including gorillas' and orangutans') social and reproductive lives.
To come at things from another angle, consider this:
1) A broader definition of personhood- Sentience being a good bench mark
2) Less rights to be considered inherent in persons- The right to life, liberty, and justice. Broad ideals with some essential laws tied to them.
3) More rights earned based upon capability- the right to vote, the right to use drugs/alcohol, the right to bare children (though that could be it's own topic).
By doing this, we open up the person bracket to anything that could be offended if we didn't let them in. At the same time, we prevent persons unable to make important and informed decisions from making said decisions.
Apply some Kantian ethics to the subject, though, and would you find yourself tossing the cognitively impaired human on the tracks? Naturally, if the answer (from anyone, not Samnell specifically) is no, what would be the discriminator if the sacrificial lamb were a cognitively-comparable (comparable, that is, to a three year old, or impaired human) creature like, say, a lamb?
I'm not a Kantian so the act itself doesn't say a whole lot to me. If the question is whether or not I would support the killing of the cognitively impaired on a whim of those who are not so impaired, it depends how impaired we're talking about. If the organism is more or less a vegetable, it's strictly an ownership issue to my mind. I'm completely fine with the owner of such an organism killing it for any reason at all, though if throwing it on the train tracks is going to inconvenience cognitively average others that's a separate issue.
But I'm generally content with the legal status of cognitively normal human three year olds now, so if it's a human operating on that level I would call it a murder.
The point to me is not in eating NO meat, but not eating creatures we consider sentient, as well as attempting to produce a sustainable model. We can either eat much less meat (as Americans specifically) or get rid of a sizable amount of the meat-eating population. I'll let you guess which one I'd prefer ;)
Should I even bother pointing out that once they're dead, they're not sentient any more?
Again, we would have to define 'respect'. As I understand it, many native American cultures 'respected' animals and yet they ate them.Would respect mean that we are obligated to prevent infanticide, coercive copulation, and warfare among what used to be called higher primates? The first two are natural aspects of certain primates' (including gorillas' and orangutans') social and reproductive lives.
This is a very interesting point.
The point to me is not in eating NO meat, but not eating creatures we consider sentient, as well as attempting to produce a sustainable model. We can either eat much less meat (as Americans specifically) or get rid of a sizable amount of the meat-eating population. I'll let you guess which one I'd prefer ;)Should I even bother pointing out that once they're dead, they're not sentient any more?
Who? The excess human population or the meat?
Who? The excess human population or the meat?
Whatever creatures are considered sentient. Once dead, they're sentient no longer. Any qualms about eating them should cease. So...yes to both, I suppose.
|
|
Apply some Kantian ethics to the subject, though, and would you find yourself tossing the cognitively impaired human on the tracks? Naturally, if the answer (from anyone, not Samnell specifically) is no, what would be the discriminator if the sacrificial lamb were a cognitively-comparable (comparable, that is, to a three year old, or impaired human) creature like, say, a lamb?
I'm not a Kantian so the act itself doesn't say a whole lot to me. If the question is whether or not I would support the killing of the cognitively impaired on a whim of those who are not so impaired, it depends how impaired we're talking about. If the organism is more or less a vegetable, it's strictly an ownership issue to my mind. I'm completely fine with the owner of such an organism killing it for any reason at all, though if throwing it on the train tracks is going to inconvenience cognitively average others that's a separate issue.
But I'm generally content with the legal status of cognitively normal human three year olds now, so if it's a human operating on that level I would call it a murder.
Sorry, Samnell--I really meant this tongue-in-cheek. I made a study of Continental philosophy because no-one in the US does...but I despise Kant (as do all the good philosophers of the last 200 years;-).
Nonetheless, I understand and agree with your remarks. As a physicalist, it's all highly organized meat and electricity to me.
Humans, AI, sentient aliens, yes. Bonobos and dolphins no. Self-awareness and communicativeness aren't a high enough standard. Hell, my cats are self-aware and communicative.Cats are not self aware to the extent that dolphins and gorillas are. The latter are self aware enough to recognise the nature of their image in a mirror. Cats just see the image in a mirror as another cat.
Really? Mine don't. I have never seen dogs do it either. In the case of dogs it may be that they are so reliant on scent to identify other animals, so they really don't bother with reflections much.
I'm pretty sure my cats are self-aware. As a sometime zen buddhist/taoist, I'm not sure that's an upgrade.
Really? Mine don't. I have never seen dogs do it either.
Just because you haven't seen them doesn't mean they haven't done it. The mirror test is a well accepted one, but not of sentience, merely of self-awareness. Not necessarily the same thing.
Evidence
More evidence
Chimps
edit: fixed link failure
Really? Mine don't. I have never seen dogs do it either.Just because you haven't seen them doesn't mean they haven't done it. The mirror test is a well accepted one, but not of sentience, merely of self-awareness. Not necessarily the same thing.
Evidence
More evidence
Chimps
edit: fixed link failure
To be fair, that was a kitten and a puppy, not full-grown animals. Human babies have similar reactions to mirrors.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Just because you haven't seen them doesn't mean they haven't done it.
I wouldn't ever claim to know. Mine was a statement of surprise given my personal experience. Thanks for the links!
I think that in this case, though, any exception that exists works in my favor, no? If a cat does not make this mistake, then that is some kind of awareness.
It's all semantic anyway. Kirth has it right, upthread, we're just a species that categorizes things — nature doesn't. Not without physical limits. That's why we have ligers and tigons.
We'll make up a definition that lets us feel different and special, and when provided with evidence to the contrary, we will change the definition. In the end, Person is a word, nothing more.